The following descriptions are provided to assist the reader to understand the relevance of the invention. However the background art is not intended and do not of themselves provide any admission by the applicant that they are published as may be required for an assessment of novelty or obviousness or are common general knowledge according to the laws of and in any particular country in the world.
The current invention relates to hand held coffee tampers. In the coffee world, a tamper is used to compress coffee grounds in the coffee ground basket/filter of a coffee espresso machine. Compressing the coffee grounds in the basket/filter helps to create the required pressure to allow more of the oils from the ground coffee to enter the cup, providing the intense flavour of espresso.
The preparation of espresso coffee involves running hot water through the compressed coffee grounds in order to deliver a desired serving of concentrated espresso coffee.
It is well known in the art, the amount of compression of the coffee grounds to form a coffee cake influences the quality of the espresso produced.
The compression of the coffee grounds in the coffee ground basket/filter to form the coffee cake is known as tamping, and is performed by devices known as tampers.
Many expert espresso coffee makers or baristas use a simple hand held tamper. These tampers usually consist of a circular tamping base for compressing the coffee grounds, and a handle attached to the base for the operator to hold the tamper. The circular tamper base has a diameter slightly smaller than the internal diameter of the coffee ground basket/filter. Ideally the tamper fits snugly into coffee ground basket/filter so even the coffee grounds near the edge of the coffee ground basket/filter are also compressed. Good quality hand held tampers are usually made from a high quality steel, and have perpendicular sides of at least 2 to 3 mm to give the tamper suitable strength. A problem with existing tampers, is that when they fit snugly in the coffee ground basket/filter which is desirable, when the tamper is removed, a vacuum is created that can create cracks or damage the coffee cake in some other way. The other issue is the coffee tamper binds or grabs the filter basket and jams. If the side of the tamper base is too thin then the tamper is often prone to be damaged from constant use.
Thus at least one object of this invention is to provide a hand held coffee tamper that alleviates or reduces the problems found with current hand held tampers.